Nearly a decade after being arrested at San Francisco International Airport then barred from the United States as a suspected terrorist, Rahinah Ibrahim, MS '02, PhD '05, has emphatically cleared her name. (See "Flight Risk?" November/December.)
In January, a federal judge ruled the Malaysian professor was the victim of a colossal paperwork mistake. An FBI agent had filled out a form "in a way exactly opposite from the instructions," Judge William Alsup wrote, "a bureaucratic analogy to a surgeon amputating the wrong digit." Alsup ordered the government to scour its terrorism watch lists and remove all references to the mistaken designation of Ibrahim, who first filed suit in 2006. Ibrahim received pro bono counsel from the San Jose law firm McManis Faulkner, which dedicated more than $3 million in attorney time to her case.
"If this win will help another innocent person, I pray for that person to prevail, too," she said.
